by Wally Lamb
“It was difficult for you today,” she said. Gave my arm a squeeze. “And yet, I hope, productive.”
I told her I was sorry.
“Yes? Sorry for what, Dominick?”
“For losing it. For screaming. All those four-letter words I was letting rip back there.”
She shook her head vigorously. “Your reactions—your insights—have been very helpful to me, Dominick. Perhaps they’ll prove crucial in the long run. One never knows. I think, however, that we should discontinue the practice of having you listen to the tapes of your brother’s sessions.”
“Why? I thought you said it helped.”
“It does. But one brother’s treatment should not put another brother at risk.”
“Look, if I can help him . . . I want to help him. If you can learn things.”
She reached for my hand. Squeezed it. “I learned something very useful today,” she said.
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“I learned that there are two young men lost in the woods. Not one. Two.”
She gave me one of those half-smiles of hers—one of those noncommittal jobs. “I may never find one of the young men,” she said. “He has been gone so long. The odds, I’m afraid, may be against it. But as for the other, I may have better luck. The other young man may be calling me.”
18
1969
The summer Thomas and I worked for the Three Rivers Public Works was also the summer of Woodstock, Chappaquiddick, and Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind.” Ray was so thrilled that we were about to beat the Russians to the moon that he went down to Abram’s Appliance Store the week before the launch and traded in our old black-and-white Emerson TV for a new cabinet-model color Sylvania. He said he didn’t care for himself, but he wanted my brother, Ma, and me to be able to see history being made on a TV where the picture didn’t roll whenever it felt like it and make everyone look like a bunch of pinheads.
Ray spent that whole first week jumping out of his chair to readjust his tint and contrast buttons; none of the rest of us was allowed to adjust the color on the new set. He must have been trying to get his money’s worth, I guess, because he always made the picture ridiculously bright—so vivid it seemed obscene. He’d fiddle with those little knobs until the NBC peacock’s tail feathers bled into each other and the field at Yankee Stadium turned psychedelic lime green. Newscasters’ complexions glowed like jack-o’-lanterns.
On the big night of the moon landing, I was on Ray’s shit list because I’d made plans with Leo Blood to drive down to Easterly Beach. “One of the biggest moments in American history and you’re going to some dance hall?” he asked.
“That’s the beauty of America, Ray,” I said. “It’s a free country.”
The wisecrack was one I could afford to spend in the wake of Ray’s tantrum with the pickle jars. For several days, he’d acted subdued with Ma. Indulgent, even. With Thomas, too, who had walked barefoot into the kitchen the morning after Ray’s jar-smashing and stepped directly onto the one jagged shard my mother’s cleanup had missed. The one-inch piece of glass had lodged itself so firmly into the heel of Thomas’s foot that neither Ma nor I had wanted to extract it. Instead, we hustled Thomas to the emergency room, where an intern poked and prodded and removed the glass. Thomas passed out during his ordeal. The gash had required both inside and outside stitches. By the time we got back home, Ray had returned from work and cleaned up the blood that trailed from the kitchen through the house and down the front stairs. He waited for us at the front door, pale and shaken. “What the hell happened?” he said. The three of us let him wait for an answer until Thomas had negotiated the cement stairs with his crutches.
More than anything, the new TV was Ray’s unspoken apology. And my going out on the night of the moon landing was my way of saying thanks but no thanks.
“They serve alcohol at this place you’re going to?” he asked, passing me as I waited at the front door for Leo to show.
“I can’t get into a place that serves alcohol,” I said. “They card you at the door.”
“They better,” he said. “I catch you doing something you’re not supposed to be doing and I’ll make your ass bleed.”
Like you made his foot bleed, you son of a bitch, I thought.
Leo’s horn finally honked somewhere after the landing of the Eagle but before Armstrong’s descent to the moon. He no longer drove his mother’s Biscayne. Now Leo tooled around in his own car, a ’66 Skylark convertible, cobalt blue, with a V-8, four on the floor, and a built-in eight-track with rear reverb speakers. He’d gotten a good deal on it because the engine leaked oil and the convertible top was stuck down, more or less permanently. He kept a case of Quaker State, a plastic sheet, and a stack of bath towels in the trunk for emergencies.
Leo drove the convertible fast and recklessly, which appealed to me, especially that night. Neil Armstrong and company may have torn through the heavens, but Leo and I were tearing down Route 22 with the Stones on the tape deck and a wall of oxygen rushing against us. I felt like I could breathe again. We drank beers all the way down there, chucking the cans out on the side of the road as we flew. Fuck Ray and fuck the moon and the astronauts, too. We were cooking.
Leo wanted to check out two clubs, the Blue Sands and a new place called the Dial-Tone Lounge. “We’re gonna get us some action, tonight, Birdsey Boy,” he called over to me. “I can feel it underneath the old loincloth.”
“The old loincloth?” I laughed. Leo let go of the steering wheel and beat his chest. Then he grabbed the wheel again, stood up straight, and yelled like Tarzan. The Skylark weaved and wobbled onto the shoulder and back again.
In the Blue Sands parking lot, Leo handed me a bogus majority card and told me to memorize my name and birthday and to look the guy at the door right in the eye. Don’t ask me why I still remember this, but I was Charles Crookshank, born January 19, 1947. “Where do you get these things, anyway?” I asked Leo.
“It’s a kit. You send away.”
The guy posted at the door looked like something out of Planet of the Apes. He studied our IDs with his flashlight, then shone the light right in our faces, pretty much killing off the idea of eye contact. “So,” Leo said. “How about this moon landing stuff? Pretty wild, eh?”
The gatekeeper ignored Leo and looked at me. “You got a driver’s license or some other form of identification, Mr. Crookshank?” he asked.
“Funny you should mention that,” Leo intervened. “We’re both from Manhattan, see? With all the buses and subways there, we just never bothered to get licenses. You don’t really need them in New York.”
“Wasn’t that you who just drove in? In the Buick with Connecticut plates?”
“Yes, it was. Very observant,” Leo laughed. “We borrowed my sister’s car.”
The guy took another look at Leo’s fake ID and asked him when his birthday was. Leo got the day right but messed up on the month. “Hit the road, you two,” the Ape Man said.
“That’s fine, my man,” Leo told him. “Peace, brother. And may I congratulate you on this great career you got going for yourself. There’s an awful lot of guys would love to be at the top of the heap like you, collecting soggy dollar bills and stamping people’s hands at a bar as scuzzy as this one.” We had to run back to the Skylark and hop over the doors, King Kong lumbering across the parking lot after us.
At the Dial-Tone Lounge, those same phony IDs got us in, no sweat. All the tables at the Dial-Tone were numbered in neon and came equipped with telephones. The gimmick was: you could scope out some chick, then call up her table and flirt for a few minutes while she and her girlfriends checked out all the guys and tried to match the conversation to the moving lips.
There were more guys than girls at the Dial-Tone. The place was crawling with sailors from the submarine base over in Groton. Most of the squids wore tie-dye and love beads and bell-bottom jeans—by ’69 it was bad for your sex life to look military—but the accents and haircuts gave
them away. Leo and I managed to snag the last table, a two-seater stuck in the corner behind a couple of squids. One was a tall, skinny doofus and the other a squat fire hydrant with eyes. “Just what we needed,” Leo mumbled as we sat down. “Popeye and Bluto blocking our view.”
“Call her,” the skinny one kept goading his no-neck friend.
“Which one?”
“The one I was talking to at the bar.”
“Should I?”
“Hell, yeah. Go for it, man! Her name’s Cindy.”
No Neck picked up the phone and dialed. “Hello? Cindy? You don’t know me, but I got a message for you from Dick Hertz.”
He cupped his hand over the receiver and winced in his effort not to laugh. “Whose Dick Hertz? Well, now that you mention it, Cindy, mine’s killing me. Care to give it some relief?” He slammed down the receiver. Their loud guffawing and table-whacking made half the people in the place look over in our direction.
“Jesus Christ, Birdsey, these guys make you look suave,” Leo said. “No wonder we’re losing the fucking war.”
No Neck’s buddy stared over at us for a couple of seconds, then leaned forward and tapped Leo on the shoulder. “Excuse me, pal, but what’d you just say?”
“Huh?” Leo said.
“I asked you what you just said. To your friend here. Something about my buddy and me and the ‘fucking war’?”
Leo looked bewildered. Then he laughed. “Fucking whores, is what I said. I said this place is full of fucking whores.”
“Oh. Well.” He looked over at his buddy and back again. “You got that right. I thought you said something else.”
“No problem, my man,” Leo said, flashing him the peace sign. I shook my head and smiled.
Leo was all horny energy as he scanned the room. His leg was tapping a mile a minute, his knuckles rapping against the tabletop. “Table 7, over by the bar?” he said. “From left to right: C-minus, C-plus, B-minus, C. Table 18, near the door, everyone’s an F except for the brunette in the white top—the one just sitting down. I’ll give her a B. Nice ass, nice set of lungs, but she loses it on the schnoz.”
“The nose knows,” No Neck leaned toward us and said.
“She could bend over and use that thing as a dildo on her friends,” his buddy added. Leo acted like Popeye and Bluto were invisible.
“Now there’s a couple of A chicks right over there, Birdsey. Table 12. Those two brunettes in the minidresses. What do you say we put them out of their misery?” He picked up the phone and told me I could have the one with bangs.
It was “mine” who answered. Leo told her he and I were visiting the East Coast from L.A. and we just had to know something. “You work for Twentieth Century Fox, too, don’t you? Haven’t we seen you on the lot out there?”
I groaned and shook my head. “Honest to Christ, Leo,” I said. “Sometimes I can’t believe you.”
He cupped his hand over the receiver. “You can eat shit, Birdseed. You’re listening to a maestro at work. You ought to be taking notes.”
He wove an elaborate story about how he and I were both Hollywood stuntmen and personal friends of Steve McQueen. Leo said he’d done some stunt work in Bullitt and that he’d just finished filming a new James Bond that wasn’t out yet. Had she and her girlfriend seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? The part where Paul Newman and Robert Redford say goodbye to each other and jump off the cliff? That was really Leo free-falling in that scene, not Rob Redford. That was what all his friends called him, by the way: Rob. He and Leo played cards together once or twice a month.
You could tell from the girls’ body language and the way they were looking over at us that they were skeptical. Then the one with the bangs handed the phone to the other one, who said something snotty to Leo. He told her she could blow it out her ass.
“See, that’s what I hate,” he said, hanging up. “An A chick who knows she’s an A chick. It goes to her head, like a brain disease. I’ll take a good-natured B chick over an A with a bad attitude any day. Your basic B chick knows enough to be grateful.”
Our waitress stood at the table, dark and slight, her long hair twisted into a braid. “You’re scoring these women?” she said.
“No, we’re hoping to score a couple,” Leo told her, looking her up and down. “Hopefully two from the A or B division.”
“Oh, well, I’m sure they’ll be impressed by your sensitivity,” she said. “What’ll you guys have?”
In the middle of writing down our orders, one of the sailors at the next table reached over and yanked our waitress’s braid. She banged her tray down, pivoted, and faced them. “Keep your hands to yourselves or I’ll have you thrown out of here,” she warned. “You understand?”
“Hey, sweetheart, I was just trying to get your attention,” No Neck said. “Can we get us another pitcher? And how about some food? Can a guy get food at this dive?”
“Yeah, you can get food,” she said. “What do you want?”
“How ’bout you, darlin’? Can I get an order of you sittin’ on my face?”
I leaned toward them. “Hey, look,” I said. “Why don’t you guys ease off and let the lady do her job?”
“No, you look,” she snapped. “I’ve been working here since noontime and the woman who was supposed to relieve me two hours ago still hasn’t shown up yet. So the last thing I need is you starting a brawl in my honor, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, holding up my hands, palms out in surrender. “Fine. Forgive me.”
She turned back to the sailors. “We have sandwiches,” she said, poker-faced. “They come with chips and a pickle. That’s what we have.”
“Sandwiches, eh? You got any baked Virginia ham sandwiches?”
“We have ham,” the waitress told him. “I don’t happen to know its point of origin.”
“Hey, baby, if you’re on the rag, it ain’t my fault. Get me a baked Virginia ham sandwich on rye with mustard and another pitcher of whatever this panther piss is we’re drinking. Scofield, you want anything to eat?”
“I’ll have some of that dessert you were talking about before,” he said. “Some of that pie à la sit-on-my-face.”
“Assholes,” the waitress mumbled. She was stuck between our two tables and I stood to let her by. “I’m not doing this to be a gentleman or anything,” I said. “Honest.”
“Just shut up,” she said, pushing past me.
Leo started explaining his personal theory about how women with dirty mouths tended to be less inhibited in the sack. I wasn’t really listening. I was watching our waitress—the way her order pad swayed in the back pocket of her jeans as she hustled back and forth, the way she retied the string on her apron and lifted up her braid to massage the nape of her neck. She was short—five feet, if that. Nice bod, nice face. There was something sort of gutsy about the way she was working the room. I couldn’t stop watching her.
The TV above the bar was turned to the moon landing, twenty or twenty-five people huddled around watching. Not that they could have heard anything over the music and the squawking deejay. Walter Cronkite was lip-synching everyone through the experience. The astronauts still hadn’t emerged from the lunar module.
I nodded up at the TV screen. “Remember when Alan Shepard went up in space? What a big deal that was?”
“I was in sixth grade,” Leo said.
“We were in fifth.”
“Who’s we?”
“Thomas and me. Our teacher brought in a radio and we got to sit around and listen and not do any work. After the splashdown, we all stood up at our desks and sang ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee.’”
He nodded. “You know what I been noticing about you, Birdsey? Whenever you talk about something, you always say ‘we.’ Like you and him are joined at the hip or something.” His eyes looked past me. “Whoa, mama, I’d like to be joined at the hip with that one.”
My eyes followed his to a long-haired blonde over by the bar. I scanned the crowd for the little waitress. Found her three tabl
es down.
“I was into all that astronaut shit when I was a kid,” Leo said.
“You?”
“Oh, yeah. Big time. Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, all those guys. I had this whole astronaut scrapbook. My main ambition in life was to go down to Cape Canaveral and shake hands with John Glenn.”
“Thomas and I had astronaut lunch boxes,” I said.
“Me, too. I had one of those. Thought I was hot stuff.”
I told Leo I wasn’t even sure how I felt about our landing on the moon. “I mean, shit, it is kind of a mind-bender—science fiction made real or something. Hooray for the guys with the slide rules. . . . But it seems so pro-Nixon. The triumph of capitalism, victory over the evil Communist empire. So what that we’re napalming a whole fucking country and getting our asses kicked besides. Right?”
“God bless America,” Leo said.
“My stepfather went out and sprung for a TV to celebrate. He’s probably sitting home right now, getting a hard-on watching it.”
“Speaking of which,” Leo said. “Check out the redhead wearing that plaid thing. Table 16. I think I’m in l-o-v-e.”
Just as he picked up the phone to dial, some other guy asked the redhead to dance. “Too bad, Sundance,” I ribbed him. “Guess you’re going to have to jump off the cliff a little faster than that.”
“Jump off this, Birdsey,” he said. “Hey, you know what Dell told me? About the astronauts? That it’s all a hoax—that they’re not really up there orbiting the moon. He says they’re hanging out in some top-secret TV studio in New Jersey. Nixon arranged it to take the heat off of the war. Dell says he read all about it in this newspaper he gets.”
“That would be the New York Times, right?” I laughed.
“Fucking Dell, man,” Leo laughed. “I don’t know what planet that guy’s from.”
A big part of that night is a blur to me. I recall dancing with some blonde in pigtails who reminded me of Ellie May Clampett. I remember the Dial-Tone passing out free champagne after Armstrong and Aldrin’s moon bounce. Remember No Neck throwing a punch at someone and getting escorted out by two bouncers. Somewhere along the way, we changed waitresses.
